My Strange Life As A Blogger

Always I've considered my blogging efforts an  outlet, even as therapeutic at times.  A writer I'm not, so I never thought I was creating literature. I enjoyed reading other blogs and thought to myself, "what the heck, why I don't do that to sort things out in my own mind." I tend to be very introspective but I've never been consistent with my diaries and journals - until blogging made that easy.

When I started I believe I was at a very low place emotionally. I titled my first blog The Blushing Animal. My inspiration was a Mark Twain quote: "Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to." I believe I had intended to collect evidence of the many ways we humans fall short of common  decency.

Then a strange thing happened. I soon realized that while I did basically agree with Twain's assessment, perhaps the majority of us (certainly I think it true of myself)  try to be decent humans. Oh yes, we fall short often and sometimes even tragically. I'm still not sure if the majority of us should be blushing or just redoubling our efforts to be nice, however, I just couldn't endure focusing on the negative. So that blog was very short-lived.

A more open approach was needed so Groping The Elephant was born. The little parable of the six blind men and the elephant by John Godfrey Saxe was my inspiration for this one. Gee, we all see things differently and all tend to be certain we are right - and we are ... in our own minds!

Groping was my first attempt to reconcile the spiritual person I originally was with the more nihilistic person I had become. Personal pain led to my bitterness. Scientific materialism was a great springboard for my cynicism. No matter how much I looked at the stranger side of life, always there was an effort to rationalize it all away.

I groped the elephant of life for quite a while before I decided I had changed.  I wanted to ease up a bit and show more openness to ideas I had pushed into the back corners of my mind. Though I always made it clear I thought of myself as just another blind man groping at something I was in no position to fully comprehend, I realized I was at times heavy handed.

So I scratched that one as well.

By now I was having trouble being consistent in my blogging. So Doug's Dribblings was born. The dribbling part referred to my infrequency. There also was a secondary image in my mind of slobber and drooling. I refuse to take myself too seriously. I know I turned off a lot of my cynical blogging friends (who probably wouldn't consider themselves so much cynical as realistic) who found me during my agnostic-on-the-way-to-atheist phase. (In the spirit of groping at the elephant I never thought it necessary to break my ties with these folks, and still don't if they are inclined to agree to disagree.)

Now I have a new internet service and I consider it yet another opportunity to start afresh. That is the why of The Strange World Of Doug B. So now my hair is let down even more.

There is so much I don't know about life and the Cosmos, but that's okay. It's always liberating to step outside of narrow confines that have either been imposed on you or that you have imposed on yourself.

I urge everyone to try it sometime. You may find you like it.

My job has kept me and has hindered my efforts to launch this current blog. I'm having to work at it as I find the time. But I foresee more time in the future (hopefully). In the meantime I'm keeping notes on the strange things I encounter and want to share with my readers, in my own life as well as those strange things that happen to others.

As always, I'm a bit uncomfortable with words like supernatural and paranormal. But sometimes it's confusing to define terms. I suppose I'm skipping slowly towards the fortean label. Really I dislike labels but can't deny their occasional usefulness. And I suppose I should add a note about my use of the word God or god. If when you see me use that you think of the popular or common  Jewish/Christian/Muslim concept, you will be misunderstanding me. I do believe everything - no, EVERYTHING - is divine and I believe there is a Supreme and divine mind back of EVERYTHING. Exactly what that means, I don't pretend to know. This blog isn't an effort to proselytize.